John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'

 An audio introduction to a paper I wrote on John Donne in the early eighties. Love was younger then.

_____. "John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'." AI audio on José Angel García Landa's paper. Academia 28 July 2026.*

         https://www.academia.edu/8202758/

2026

 

 

Fuegos fatuos

 Un poema de Gerardo Diego, de Cementerio Civil (1972).

 

        FUEGOS FATUOS

     ¿Cómo son los fuegos fatuos?

Yo nunca los vi.

¿Seré yo alguna noche

un fuego fatuo —ay— de mí?

Que la tierra es cementerio

yo lo sé

desde que vuelo de noche

inclinándome de ala,

sacando uñas, ruedas, garras

—aprieten los cinturones—

y abajo verdes, moradas,

las luces de las balizas

aluden a las cenizas 

sepultadas.

 

    El aire es para vivir,

la tierra para morir.

Desciñan los cinturones.

Y el alivio de pisar

y pesar

sobre el opaco cemento,

memento, 

cerrazón de cementerio.

El aire para volar,

la tierra para enterrar

y sin saber para qué

el misterio de la mar.

 

 

 

Yo voy soñando caminos

Un poema de Antonio Machado que recitábamos con mi madre uno de sus últimos días conmigo.

  

YO VOY SOÑANDO CAMINOS

Yo voy soñando caminos
de la tarde. ¡Las colinas
doradas, los verdes pinos,
las polvorientas encinas!...
¿Adónde el camino irá?
Yo voy cantando, viajero
a lo largo del sendero...
- La tarde cayendo está-.
"En el corazón tenía
la espina de una pasión;
logré arrancármela un día:
ya no siento el corazón".
Y todo el campo un momento
se queda, mudo y sombrío,
meditando. Suena el viento
en los álamos del río.
La tarde más se oscurece;
y el camino que serpea
y débilmente blanquea
se enturbia y desaparece.
Mi cantar vuelve a plañir:
"Aguda espina dorada,
quién te pudiera sentir
en el corazón clavada".

 

Arcano

 

La línea del amor y de la muerte

me dijeron que tengo fusionadas

cuando aquellas fugaces campanadas

iniciaran mi tiempo de quererte.

Lo cierto es que la nave de mi suerte

boga hacia misteriosas ensenadas,

tan remotas, de ti tan alejadas

que no puedo esperar volver a verte.

Creo que es mi destino el de saberte

unido a mí tan sólo en el poema

y en un espacio onírico sentirte

—en el corazón mismo— sin tenerte;

el de aferrarme a un remo que no rema

y en mi propio naufragio sumergirte.

 

(Marina Soro) 

 

 

 

 

Pasas por mi calle

 

Robert de Beaugrande's Epiphany

Epiphany

 

by Robert de Beaugrande

Long since I braved in unframed glazed amazement
Re-bonding my despondent blonde insomnia
To spin equivocal erratic epic,
Belated maze of many-edgèd legends
And many-ended memories.
 
I might uncurl my swirling unshored odyssey
Embayed in memory’s meridians,
Distending networked blends of vibrant lifelines…
 
I’d de-reflect the echoes of my vanished stanzas
Writ in silvered sun-script on a river’s restive eddies,
On plasmaed azure axioms from seething seas
On hoary forests’ whispered mists
On crystal cities’ distal walls and walks...
 
Perhaps I might un-scar the darkling particles
That hover fuzzily on credos of unheeded dreams
And drift their wisps into divining wines
To sully all with galling sullen colors.
Perhaps I might un-cipher cryptic scriptures
In fields and forests or in labyrinthine villages
Skimmed from dimming windows of re-tracking aircraft
Perhaps I might beneath unworded surfaces
Unfurl redeeming meanings or uplifting missives
Resculpting sunken sufferings as joy-toyed buoyancies…
 
And yet mayhap such furtive earth-burled searches
Under sundry surfaces unburden dearths
That merely mirror weirder wavy images,
Or bloat demoted hopes or caustic losses
Or transitory cancelled chances...
 
I might exhume a doom of smeltered cellars
Whose acrid casks untapped from smarting harvest
Etch the seams of years with searing scars.
 
The landscape-tableaus of my unplumbed countries
Might dub with muddling puzzles or unbroken codes
Untaming my emplanèd never resting-quest.
                         ——————
  
This lone intoned recital of unchanging rain-song
Revivifies the rivulets of deep depreciated seasons
Immured in currents murmuring of oceans ...
 
On such a plaintive greying rain-stained day
Uncertain birth immersed me in the world
That new-distillèd children flail with wordless wails
Emergent couriers of later plaint.
My child-world was whirled in legendarities
Enchanted fantasies and tattered tales of sages
Rebordered in the lordly rolls of early earth.
 
I multituded broods with agile magic
With fancied gentries reveling in untroubled love
With pageants of impervious and ivory victories
Arraigned by fabled races over evil’s creatures.
 
I mazed the blazing brands of brazen knights
Who over-toppled ghastly gnashing towers
And courted welcomes swelled by welling trumpets,
The thanks of kings untinged from hellish spells…
 
                     ——————
 
My mind resigned divined a doubled study
Intoned on tomes of fustian history
The dawning chronicles of length-indentured centuries
Swayed by waning crowns of mired tyrants…
I tredded the unbedded tablets of Egyptian mysteries
Exhumed from fruitless tombs of stony dynasty;
I distaled lists of gore-born laurels
From world-diseasing seizure Roman rule:
Those poisonous despoils for a lonely throne
Imposing over-throated dotaged yoke atop the ancient age
Yet flayed at bay with straining slaves and guilded guilt.
 
Despite unfettered dressages of early journals
Their stranded languages still molded hope
For mankind realigning dire crimes —
The starkly marching rows of Roman legions,
Unmired midst the latitudes of Latin language
Whose sentiments were rent in tempelled thought,
And verses urned in turns of firmèd bronze,
In iambics or pentameters of attic vintage….
 
And in monastic scripts of medieval scribes
I heeded deeds of sinless princes and untainted saints
Who strongly strove or meekly preached against an iron time
And spent unfettered deaths for high celestial respite —
Endearing miracles emblazoned in cathedrals
Soaring lofty frozen light and marble shadow,
Still sketching on our skyscapes their uplifting riddles.
 
I limned intrinsic principles that lash those happenings
Decide the gliding glorias of empire or republic
Allaying greyest nadir or supremest zenith;
I clerked some mark to hark purveying greatness
To deem resplendant regents from the fleeting…
 
But this instead there treaded tragic axiom
Which stitches history a cataclysmic pattern:
That force-torn wars insanely maimed the meek,
That high-born castes ensavaged sanguine footfalls on the low…
We today in our apathetic anesthetizing times
Decorate belatedly the fated graves
Of rarely chartered martyrs who disproved this brutal rule.
For we, not fazed by fabled fey invaders,
Are terror-flared by silent sightless systems
Splaying fear-inbreeding evils on statistic scales
Dismembering pretended enemies upon haphazard maps
And disinforming drastic battlefields and torture cages.
We forage holy glory with expedient credos
And save our doleful souls in offshore vaults.
                             ——————              
Yet I demurred in terse unswerving certitude
That god-placed graces must reface injustices
Redeem believers in undying triumph —
I could not realize the realest zeal of heroes
Nor guess their destinies that wend with winds:
Implode at crossroads into uninflected steps;
Implore the unformed stories of receding realms;
Encapsulate to fractious masses in unmasted bastions
Revisions of recidivist realities...
To earn with roiling toils world-encircling journeys
Until unfabled death in cobbled gutter
Nested in the leaf-loft eaves of last nomadic legend in a leveled age.
                             ——————
MY biding drive in life imprinted mint beginnings
To gear the multi-tiered machinery of meaning;
Still I have grasped but hasps of facts I mapped,
Witting flinted wisdom with erosion’s slowness.

 

 

 
 

from Robert de Beaugrande's website

 

—oOo— 

García Landa, José Angel. "Robert de Beaugrande." From A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology. Online at Scribd 27 Dec. 2017.*

         https://es.scribd.com/document/367951630/Beaugrande-R-de

         2025

Loving in Truth

 

Arènes de Lutèce

  

Arènes de Lutèce

De là ou nous sommes assis plus haut que les gradins
je nous vois entrer du côté de la Rue des Arènes,
hésiter, regarder en l'air, puis pesamment
venir vers nous à travers le sable sombre,
de plus en plus laids, aussi laids que les autres,
mais muets. Un petit chien vert
entre en courant du côté de la rue Monge,
elle s'arrête, il disparait
derrière le socle du savant Gabriel de Mortillet.
Elle se retourne, je suis parti, je gravis seul
les marches rustiques, je touche de ma main gauche
la rampe rustique, elle est en béton. Elle hésite,
fait un pas vers la sortie de la Rue Monge, puis me suit.
J'ai un frisson, c'est moi qui me rejoins,
c'est avec d'autres yeux que maintenant je regarde
le sable, les flaques d'eau sous la bruine,
une petite fille traînant derrière elle un cerceau,
un couple, qui sait des amoureux, la main dans la main,
les gradins vides, les hautes maisons, le ciel
qui nous éclaire trop tard.
Je me retourne, je suis étonné
de trouver là son triste visage.

Alone

 

Siegfried Sassoon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'When I'm alone'— the words tripped off his tongue

As though to be alone were nothing strange.

'When I was young,'  he said; 'when I was young....'

 

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change.

I thought how strange we grow when we're alone,

And how unlike the selves that meet, and talk,

And blow the candles out, and say good-night.

Alone... The word is life endured and known.

It is the stillness where our spirits walk

And all but inmost faith is overthrown.